John F. Kennedy, a self-described
liberal, gives two different definitions of liberalism:

Most modern American liberals support a mixed economy, with free enterprise except in
those cases where, in their view, it becomes a threat to the
economic well-being of the country. American liberals support the
right of all citizens to the necessities of life, a more equitable
distribution of wealth, and protection of the environment.

Modern American liberalism grew out of the liberal tradition on
which America was founded and, in the words of the preamble to the
Constitution of the
United States, seeks to "promote the general Welfare, and
secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity".
Most modern American liberals believe that this requires an active
role for the government. However, some modern American liberals,
who call themselves classical
liberals, libertarians, or
conservatives assert that the best way
to promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty
is to minimize government intervention in the economy.

The word "liberalism" has a somewhat different meaning in the
United States and in Britain than it does in continental Europe,
where it is more commonly associated with a commitment to limited government and laissez-faire economic policies.

American versus European use of the term "liberalism"

Today the word "liberalism" is used differently in different
countries. (See Liberalism
worldwide) One of the greatest contrasts is between the
usage in the United States and usage in Continental Europe. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (writing in
1956), "Liberalism in the American usage has little in common with
the word as used in the politics of any European country, save
possibly Britain."

According to Girvetz and Minogue writing in Encyclopedia
Britannica, "contemporary liberalism has come to represent
different things to Americans and Europeans: In the United States
it is associated with the welfare-state policies of the New Deal program of Democratic President
Franklin D.Roosevelt, whereas in Europe liberals
are more commonly conservative in their
political and economic outlook." Continental Europeans often apply
the term "liberal" mainly to an individual's economic liberties,
such as free markets and hence they
have many positions in common with American libertarians.

In late 20th century and early 21st century political discourse in
the United States, "liberalism" has come to mean support for
freedom of speech, separation of
church and state, reproductive rights for women, civil liberties,
equal rights for gay people, and multilateralism and international
institutions. All of these aims are mostly shared by British and
other European liberals. American liberals also believe in the
relief of poverty by government
intervention, universal healthcare, a progressive income tax, a
positive role for organized labor, and the protection of the
environment. In Europe these views are shared by Social Democrats, but not necessarily by
liberals, especially in France and continental Europe, where
classical economic liberal views are prominent among liberal
parties. Britain's liberals would agree with most of these
positions, but affirmative action
would be described as an illiberal policy.

However, there are also major distinctions between modern American
liberalism and the European notion of
social democracy, specifically, the
lack of socialist influences and programs.
Firstly, while socialists generally follow the principle of
maximin (and believe the state
is the proper organization to achieve it), American liberals are
more likely to limit government actions to the point where they
guarantee a decent quality of life, and decent public services to
working families and poor workers. Social democratic programs are
aimed at providing national welfare programs for the entire
country, while American liberal social programs are designed to
assist only lower-class individuals. Secondly, American liberals
are less likely to countenance nationalization of private sector industries
as a solution to any problem; this is in contrast to socialists,
who often have sought or implemented nationalization of industries
in their countries. Third, American liberalism attempts to achieve
a fairer distribution of
power in society, as opposed to
just a more fair distribution of wealth.

Though the British and Canadian liberal parties have an
understanding of liberalism similar to those of the United States,
the political discourse in Australia is
different to both America's and Europe's. The Australian political
party known as The Liberal
Party holds an ideology which would be called conservative in most other countries.
The
United
Kingdom's Liberal
Democrats have an understanding of liberalism somewhat similar
to that of modern American liberalism, although without the
communitarian aspect.The
Liberal Party of Canada also
shares similar views to that of modern American liberalism, but in
a distinctive Canadian
context.

Demographics of American liberals

While it is difficult to gather demographic information on
ideological groups, some studies have been conducted. Liberalism
remains most popular among those in academia and liberals commonly
tend to be highly educated and relatively affluent. According to
recent surveys, between 19% and 26% of the American electorate
identify as liberal, versus moderate or conservative. A 2004 study
by the Pew Research Center identified 19% of Americans as liberal.
According to the study, liberals were the most educated ideological
demographic and were tied with the conservative sub-group, the
"Enterprisers," for the most affluent group. Of those who
identified as liberal, 49% were college graduates and 41% had
household incomes exceeding $75,000, compared to 27% and 28% as the
national average, respectively.

Liberalism also remains the dominant political ideology in
academia, with 72% of full-time faculty identifying as liberal in a
2004 study. The social sciences and
humanities were most liberal, whereas
business and engineering departments were the least liberal, though
even in the business departments, liberals outnumbered
conservatives 49% to 39%. Generally, the more educated a person is
the more likely he or she is to hold liberal beliefs.

In the 2000, 2004 and 2006 elections, the vast majority of liberals
voted in favor of the Democrats, though liberals
may also show support for the Greens.

Scholar of liberalism Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., writing in 1956, said that liberalism in the
United States includes both a "laissez-faire" form and a "government intervention" form. He
holds that liberalism in the United States is aimed toward
achieving "equality of opportunity for all" but it is the means of
achieving this that changes depending on the circumstances. He says
that the "process of redefining liberalism in terms of the social
needs of the 20th century was conducted by Theodore Roosevelt and his New Nationalism, Woodrow Wilson and his New Freedom, and Franklin D.Roosevelt and his New Deal. Out of these three reform periods there
emerged the conception of a social welfare
state, in which the national government had the express
obligation to maintain high levels of employment in the economy, to
supervise standards of life and labor, to regulate the methods of
business competition, and to establish comprehensive patterns of
social security."

Some make the distinction between "American classical liberalism"
and the "new liberalism."

Early modern liberalism

Herbert Croly, philosopher and
political theorist, was the first to effectively combine classical liberal theory with progressive philosophy to form what would come
to be known as modern liberalism in the United States. Croly
presented the case for a planned economy, increased spending on
education, and the creation of a society based on the "brotherhood
of mankind," ideas that are now an integral part of American
government. Croly founded the periodical, The New Republic, still in
circulation, which continues to present liberal ideas.His ideas
influenced the political views of both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. In 1909, Croly published
The Promise of American
Life, in which he proposed raising the general standard of
living by means of economic planning and in which he opposed
aggressive unionization. In The Techniques of Democracy
(1915) he argued against both dogmatic individualism and dogmatic
socialism.

The New Deal

President Franklin D.Roosevelt came to office in 1933 amid
the economic calamity of the Great
Depression, offering the nation a New
Deal intended to alleviate economic want and joblessness,
provide greater opportunities, and restore prosperity. His
presidency from 1933 to 1945, the longest in U.S. history, was
marked by an increased role for the Federal government in
addressing the nation's economic and social problems. Work relief
programs provided jobs, ambitious projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority were
created to promote economic development, and a social security system was established. The
Great Depression dragged on through the early and middle 1930s,
showing some signs of relief in the late decade, though full
recovery didn't come until the total mobilization of U.S. economic, social, and
military resources for the Allied cause in World War II. The New
Deal programs to relieve the Depression are generally regarded as a
mixed success in ending the nation's economic problems on a
macroeconomic level. Still, although fundamental economic
indicators may have remained depressed, the programs of the New
Deal were extremely popular, as they improved the life of the
common citizen, by providing jobs for the unemployed, legal
protection for labor unionists, modern utilities for rural America,
living wages for the working poor, and price stability for the
family farmer, though economic progress for minorities was hindered
by discrimination, an issue often avoided by Roosevelt's
administration.

The New Deal consisted of three types of programs designed to
produce "Relief, Recovery and Reform:

Recovery was the goal of restoring the economy to
pre-Depression levels. It involved "pump priming" (greater spending
of government funds in an effort to stimulate the economy,
including deficit spending), dropping the gold standard, efforts to increase farm prices
that were too low to support common farmers, and efforts to
increase foreign trade through the
reduction of tariffs. Efforts contemporary with the New Deal to
help corporate America were channeled through a Hoover program of
loans and loan guarantees, overseen by the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation (RFC).

Reform was based on the assumption that the
depression was caused by the inherent instability of the market and
that government intervention was necessary to rationalize and
stabilize the economy, and to balance the interests of farmers,
business and labor. Reform measures included the National Industrial Recovery
Act (NIRA), regulation of Wall Street by the Securities Exchange Act
(SEA), the Agricultural
Adjustment Act (AAA) for farm programs, Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation (FDIC) insurance for bank deposits enacted through
the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933,
and the National Labor
Relations Act (NLRA) (also known as the Wagner Act) dealing
with labor-management relations. Despite urgings by some New
Dealers, there was no major anti-trust program. Roosevelt opposed
socialism (in the sense of state ownership
of the means of production), and only one major program, the
Tennessee Valley
Authority (TVA), involved government ownership of the means of
production, specifically the construction of power plants and
electrical infrastructure—which otherwise would probably not have
been built.

In international affairs, Roosevelt's presidency was dominated by
the outbreak of World War II and
American entry into the war in 1941. Anticipating the post-war
period, Roosevelt strongly supported proposals to create a United Nations organization as a means of
encouraging mutual cooperation to solve problems on the
international stage. His commitment to internationalist ideals was
in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson,
architect of the failed League of
Nations.

Embedded liberalism

The term embedded liberalism,
credited to John Ruggie, refers not to a
political philosophy but rather to the economic system which
dominated worldwide from the end of World
War II to the 1970s. This is the economic system liberals were
responding to at the inception of modern liberalism.

Liberalism during the Cold War

The essential tenets of Cold War liberalism can be found in
Roosevelt's Four Freedoms (1941): of
these, freedom of speech and
of religion were classic liberal
freedoms, as was "freedom from fear" (freedom from tyrannical
government), but "freedom from want" was another matter. Roosevelt
proposed a notion of freedom that went beyond government
non-interference in private lives. "Freedom from want" could
justify positive government action to meet economic needs, a
concept more associated with the concepts of Lincoln's Republican party, Clay's Whig
Party, and Hamilton's
economic principles of government intervention and subsidy than the
more radical socialism and social democracy of European thinkers or
with prior versions of classical liberalism as represented by
Jefferson's
Democratic-Republican and Jackson's Democratic party.

Defining itself against both Communism and
conservatism, Cold War liberalism resembled earlier "liberalisms"
in its views on many social issues and personal liberty, but its
economic views were not those of free-market Jeffersonian liberalism; instead,
they constituted ideas of American progressive thought rooted in
Clay, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt which resembled a mild form
of European styled social democracy.

Most prominent and constant among the positions of Cold War
liberalism were:

Support for a domestic economy built on a balance of power
between labor (in the form of organized unions) and management (with a tendency to be
more interested in large corporations than in small business).

A
foreign policy focused on containing the Soviet Union and its allies.

The continuation and expansion of New Deal social welfare
programs (in the broad sense of welfare, including programs such as
Social
Security).

In some ways this resembled what in other countries was referred to
as social democracy. However,
unlike European social democrats, U.S.
liberals never widely endorsed nationalization of industry but regulation
for public benefit.

In the late 1940s, liberals generally did not see Harry S.Truman as one of their own, viewing him as a
Democratic Party hack. However, liberal politicians and liberal
organizations such as the Americans for Democratic
Action (ADA) sided with Truman in opposing Communism both at
home and abroad, sometimes at the expense of civil liberties. For example, ADA co-founder
and archetypal Cold War liberal Hubert
Humphrey unsuccessfully sponsored (in 1950) a Senate bill to
establish detention centers where those declared subversive by the
President could be
held without trial.

Nonetheless, liberals opposed McCarthyism and were central to McCarthy's
downfall.

The liberal consensus

By 1950, the liberal ideology was so intellectually dominant that
the literary critic Lionel Trilling
could write that "liberalism is not only the dominant but even the
sole intellectual tradition... there are no conservative or
reactionary ideas in circulation...." [Lapham 2004]

For almost two decades, Cold War liberalism remained the dominant
paradigm in U.S. politics, peaking with the landslide victory of
Lyndon B.Johnson over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential
election. Lyndon Johnson had been a New Deal Democrat in the 1930s
and by the 1950s had decided that the Democratic Party had to break
from its segregationist past and endorse racial liberalism as well as economic
liberalism. In the face of the disastrous defeat of Goldwater, the
Republicans accepted more than a few of Johnson's ideas as their
own, so to a very real extent, the policies of President Johnson
became the policies of the Republican administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald R.Ford.

Liberals and civil rights

Cold War liberalism emerged at a time when most African Americans, especially in the South, were politically and
economically disenfranchised. Beginning with To Secure These Rights, an
official report issued by the Truman White House in 1947,
self-proclaimed liberals increasingly embraced the civil rights
movement. In 1948, President Truman desegregated the armed forces
and the Democrats inserted a strong civil rights "plank"
(provision) in the Democratic party
platform. Legislatively, the civil rights movement would
culminate in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of
1965.

During the 1960s, relations between white liberals and the civil rights movement became
increasingly strained; civil rights leaders accused liberal
politicians of temporizing and procrastinating. Although President
Kennedy sent federal troops to compel the University of
Mississippi to admit African American James Meredith in 1962, and civil rights
leader Martin Luther King,
Jr. toned down the March on Washington
(1963) at Kennedy's behest, the failure to seat the delegates of the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National
Convention indicated a growing rift. President Johnson
could not understand why the rather impressive civil rights laws
passed under his leadership had failed to immunize Northern and
Western cities from rioting. At the same time, the civil rights
movement itself was becoming fractured. By 1966, a Black Power movement had emerged; Black Power
advocates accused white liberals of trying to control the civil
rights agenda. Proponents of Black Power wanted African-Americans
to follow an "ethnic model" for obtaining power , not unlike that
of Democratic political machines in large cities. This put them on
a collision course with urban machine politicians. And, on its most
extreme edges, the Black Power movement contained racial
separatists who wanted to give up on integration altogether — a
program that could not be endorsed by American liberals of any
race. The mere existence of such individuals (who always got more
media attention than their actual numbers might have warranted)
contributed to "white backlash" against liberals and civil rights
activists.

According to Lind, this group of people influenced or later became
neoconservatives.

Liberals and Vietnam

While the civil rights movement isolated liberals from their
erstwhile allies, the Vietnam War threw
a wedge into the liberal ranks, dividing pro-war "hawks" such as
Senator Henry M.Jackson from "doves" such as 1972
Presidential candidate Senator George
McGovern. As the war became the leading political issue of the
day, agreement on domestic matters was not enough to hold the
liberal consensus together.

In the 1960 presidential campaign, the liberal Kennedy was more
hawkish on Southeast Asia than the
more conservative Nixon. Although it can be argued that the war
expanded only under the less liberal Johnson, there was
considerable continuity of their cabinets.

Nixon and the liberal consensus

While the differences between Nixon and the liberals are obvious –
the liberal wing of his own party favored politicians like Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton, and Nixon overtly placed
an emphasis on "law and order" over civil liberties, and Nixon's Enemies List was composed
largely of liberals – in some ways the continuity of many of
Nixon's policies with those of the Kennedy-Johnson years is more
remarkable than the differences. Pointing at this continuity,
Noam Chomsky has called Nixon, "in many
respects the last liberal president."

The political dominance of the liberal consensus even into the
Nixon years can best be seen in policies such as the establishment
of the Environmental Protection Agency or his (failed) proposal to
replace the welfare system with a guaranteed annual income by way
of a negative income tax.
Affirmative action in its most
quota-oriented form was a Nixon administration policy. Even the
Nixon "War on Drugs" allocated
two-thirds of its funds for treatment, a far higher ratio than was
to be the case under any subsequent President, Republican or
Democrat. Additionally, Nixon's normalization of
diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China and his policy of détente with the Soviet
Union were probably more popular with liberals than with his
conservative base.

End of the liberal consensus

During the Nixon years (and through the 1970s), the liberal
consensus began to come apart with the election of Ronald Reagan
marking the election of the first non-Keynsian administration and
the first application of supply-side economics. The alliance with
white Southern Democrats had been lost in the Civil Rights era.
While the steady enfranchisement of African Americans expanded the
electorate to include many new voters sympathetic to liberal views,
it was not quite enough to make up for the loss of some Southern
Democrats. A tide of conservatism rose in response to perceived
failures of liberal policies. Organized labor, long a bulwark of
the liberal consensus, was past the peak of its power in the U.S.
and many unions had remained in favor of the Vietnam War even as
liberal politicians increasingly turned against it.

Possibility of a new consensus

Political scientists, pundits and journalists point to the
increasing number of people who identify as liberal, the
progressive tendencies of the young and the rapid increase in
non-white demographics as signs that
the possibility for a new liberal consensus exists. A recent study
by the Pew Research Center found
that liberals are now the largest and fastest growing ideological group,
while recent polls have found that young Americans are considerably
more liberal than the general population.

The people's will should have more influence on U.S. laws than
the Bible.

74%

58%

Moreover, Democrats
have regained political supremacy by becoming the majority in both
houses of Congress and a
majority of state legislatures and governorships in 2006, and
electing Barack Obama as president in
2008. Recent poll results show the population favoring Democrats
over Republicans by
the largest margin since the late 1960s.

Philosophy of modern liberalism

American liberals describe themselves as open to change and
receptive to new ideas. For example, liberals often accept
scientific ideas that some conservatives reject, such as evolution
and global warming.

In general liberalism is anti-socialist, when socialism means state
ownership of the basic means of production and distribution,
because American liberals doubt that bases for political opposition
and freedom can survive when all power is vested in the state. In
line with the general pragmatic, empirical basis of liberalism,
American liberal philosophy embraces the idea that if substantial
abundance and equality of opportunity can be achieved through a
system of mixed enterprise, then there
is no need for a rigid and oppressive bureaucracy. Some liberal
public intellectuals have, since the 1950s, moved further toward
the general position that markets, when appropriately regulated,
can provide better solutions than top-down planning and central
control. Paul Krugman argued that, in hitherto-state-dominated
functions such as nation-scale energy distribution and
telecommunications, marketizations can improve efficiency
dramatically.. He also defended a monetary policy -- inflation targeting -- as a solution to
Japan's economic slump by saying that it "most nearly approaches
the usual goal of modern stabilization policy, which is to provide
adequate demand in a clean, unobtrusive way that does not distort
the allocation of resources." (These distortions are of a kind that
war-time and post-war Keynesian economists had accepted as an
inevitable byproduct of fiscal policies that selectively reduced
certain consumer taxes and directed nt spending toward
government-managed stimulus projects—even where these economists
theorized at a contentious distance from some of Keynes's own, more
hands-off, positions, which tended to emphasize stimulating of
business investment.) Thomas Friedman is a liberal journalist who,
like Paul Krugman, generally defends free trade as more likely to
improve the lot of both rich and poor countries.

Many of these ideas were initially promulgated by liberal thinkers
John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, and John Maynard Keynes and form the basis
for the American liberal philosophy. The political godfather of
American liberalism, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt never publicly embraced Keynes's theories but
there were many similarities between the works of the two men. The
ideas of American liberal philosophers and American liberal
politicians, such as Roosevelt, laid the foundation for American
liberalism that remains a viable political philosophy embraced by a
significant percentage of Americans.

According to cognitive linguist George
Lakoff, liberal philosophy is based on five basic categories of
morality. The first, the promotion of fairness, is generally
described as an emphasis on empathy as a desirable trait. With this
social contract based on the Golden
Rule comes the rationale for many liberal positions. The second
category is assistance to those who cannot assist themselves. A
nurturing spirit is one that is considered good in liberal
philosophy. This leads to the third category, the desire to protect
those who cannot defend themselves. The fourth category is the
importance of fulfilling one's life; allowing a person to
experience all that they can. The fifth and final category is the
importance of caring for oneself, since only thus can one act to
help others.

Some positions associated with modern liberalism

The following are some ideas that many contemporary American
liberals and progressives support:

Support of workers' rights to organize labor unions, and to bargain collectively with
their employer about wages, benefits, and terms and conditions of
employment;

Feminism, reproductive rights,
comprehensive sex education, free or
low-cost contraception, and free or
low-cost reproductive health care; many liberals also include a
woman's right to choose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, though
not all liberals agree about induced abortion.

The following are some ideas that have some support among liberals,
but on which there is no clear liberal consensus.

On globalization, American liberals
stand largely divided. Liberal members of the intelligentsia and
the professional class tend to favor globalization. Members of
organized labor, on the other hand, tend to be opposed to increased
globalization:

Negative use of the term "liberal"

The negative connotation of the term "liberal" in American politics
dates at least from the time of self-proclaimed American liberal
President John F. Kennedy. In his
speech accepting the Presidential nomination by the New York Liberal Party on September 14, 1960, Kennedy
contested the claims of his "opponents" that "liberal" meant
"someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local
government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's
dollar."

John Lukacs, in his 2004 essay "The
Triumph and Collapse of Liberalism," observed a change in the
political usage of the term "liberal" from the 1950s onward. Noting
that in 1951, Senator Joseph
McCarthy used "liberal" positively when condemning "a
conspiracy of infamy so bleak that, when it is finally exposed, its
principles shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all
liberal men," and that conservative leader Senator Robert A.Taft
stated he was not a conservative but "an old-fashioned liberal."
Lukacs also asserted that the word "liberal" "has become a Bad Word
for millions of Americans."

The use of pejorative terms such as "bleeding-heart liberal",
"knee-jerk liberal", "tax-and-spend liberal", "cut-and-run
liberal", "Massachusetts
liberal", "limousine liberal",
and "liberal elite", is a common
political tactic in modern American politics. As an example,
Republican political consultant Arthur J.Finkelstein was known to repeat the
word "liberal" in negative television commercials as frequently as
possible, e.g.: "That's liberal. That's Jack Reed. That's wrong. Call liberal Jack Reed
and tell him his record on welfare is just too liberal for you."
Many liberal contemporary politicians have tended to shy away from
the "liberal" label, preferring terms such as "progressive" or
"moderate."

"Liberal" is also used as a slur by anarchists, Marxists, and
other leftists who disdain liberals as hypocritical apologists for
capitalism, racism, sexism, and imperialism. Folk singer Phil Ochs used the term in this manner in his song
"Love Me, I'm a Liberal:"